In March 1945, with Paris liberated but Europe still technically at war, French couturier Lucien Lelong organized a new kind of fashion presentation in the city. “Théâtre de la Mode,” staged in a wing of the Louvre, saw 40 designers exhibit their collections on a series of wired dolls each standing at just 27.5 inches tall. Four of these dolls, dressed by Balenciaga, are now on display for the very first time in the U.K. as part of “Catwalk: the Art of the Fashion Show” at V&A Dundee in Scotland, where some 350 objects and around 40 videos tell the story of 125 years of runway shows.

“The idea actually came from Vitra Design Museum, with whom we’ve collaborated before,” says fashion historian and curator Kirsty Hassard. Together with V&A colleague Svetlana Panova, Hassard worked on the exhibition alongside Jochen Eisenbrand and Katharina Krawczyk from Vitra in Germany. “They’d never done fashion, but we’re both design museums, so we could approach the show from a unique angle.” Indeed, characterized by V&A Dundee director Leonie Bell as a “symphony of different design disciplines,” Catwalk celebrates the wider community of creatives who shape the industry, framed around a sartorial history lesson that calls attention to fashion’s relationship with culture and society.

Other miniatures include Loewe’s Show in a Box from the pandemic-era spring 2021 season, and several scale-model Prada sets from the house’s long-term collaborators OMA/AMO. Meanwhile, blown up on a wall are the Colette-blue squares that typically populate Stylenotcom’s Instagram page, indicating how much people’s engagement with fashion shows has shifted. Elsewhere are looks, invites, and props by designers like Christopher Kane, Martin Margiela, and Cristóbal Balenciaga, plus rare ephemera like Elite’s casting list of models booked for Azzedine Alaïa’s 1985 Palladium show in New York.

First presented at Vitra last October, this second iteration of “Catwalk” has been expanded to honor the museum’s locale, says Hassard. “We wanted to tell that unique story of how Scotland is both a stage for fashion shows but also an inspiration,” says the curator, alluding to Chanel’s Linlithgow Palace show for the Metiers d’Art 2012 collection and two Dior shows held in Scotland in 1955. Spread out across six galleries, the exhibition also spotlights the backstage, with two areas focusing on the BTS work of photographer Robert Fairer, hairstylist Sam McKnight, and makeup artist Val Garland.

Employed throughout the space in varying sizes and formats is footage from runway shows, interview segments, and fashion films—among them Chanel’s monumental supermarket sweep (fall 2014), Hussein Chalayan’s transformative show, Afterwords (fall 2000), and William Klein’s satirical arthouse piece, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966). “We wanted to present this link between fashion shows and popular culture, because there are shows—like Tom Ford’s Gucci and No. 13 by Alexander McQueen—that transcend fashion history,” says the curator, referencing Ford’s slick fall 1995 collection and the iconic spring 1999 finale, wherein Shalom Harlow got sprayed by a pair of robots.

“The exhibition proves what has massively changed since the beginning of fashion shows and what hasn’t,” says Hassard, leaning into the question of the artistic pertinence of the runway in 2026. “Covid was meant to usher in this big change, but designers still return to the fashion show format because nothing can quite replace it. They are always relevant, a product of the world that they’re created in, affected by social history and changes in technology.”

“Catwalk: the Art of the Fashion Show” runs at V&A Dundee from April 3, 2026, through January 17, 2027.